Use what we sell, sell what we use (Part 1)

July 11, 2018Debankan Chattopadhyay

(This is the first part of a 2-part series…)

We have taken “Practice what you preach” to a whole new level and applied it to our business. Why? Because….well, just because. Actually, I wish I could simply leave it at that. But the truth is much more sinister than that Allow me to explain.

Some background information first. A significant part of our business is licensing our CAD interoperability toolkits to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) in the CAD/CAM/PLM space. And there, we have a few options, viz. ODX, UIOp or Oceans SDK. I won’t bore you with the details (that’s what hyperlinks are for, right?), but suffice it to say that these libraries provide read & write access to all major CAD formats. But unlike, end-user software, evaluating toolkits/APIs is not easy. It’s much more involved and labor intensive.

That’s where our end-user products like EnSuite, EnSuite-Lite, EnSuite-View and Explore 3D come in! These products that we sell to end-users are all built using our own CAD interop toolkits. Explore 3D uses Oceans SDK and depending on which variant of the EnSuite product you use (Lite/View), it’s a mix of either ODX and/or UIOp.

Why do we do it? In no particular order...

Reason 1: to make it easy for you to evaluate our CAD interop toolkits

Any of our end-user products can be used by ISVs to do a quick-and-dirty evaluation of the underlying technology. Although this is not a conclusive way to make a decision (we always recommend creating a sample application using the APIs) since each application has its own nuances and requirements, it’s still a great start point when dealing with evaluation of our interop APIs.

Reason 2: to help us understand issues in integration

When we use our own technology to create end-user products/applications, it gives us a much better appreciation for the kind of issues ISVs are likely to encounter when integrating our toolkits. It is here that we become experts at identifying such integration issues and be in a great position to provide support to our ISV customers. When they come knocking with an integration problem, more often than not, we are in a “been there, done that” situation.